The Vatican has announced that a work in its collection is newly attributed to the Greek painter and sculptor El Greco. The work, titled The Redeemer (ca. 1590–95), is now on view in an exhibition named “El Greco in the Mirror: Two Paintings in Dialogue” at the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo outside of Rome’s city center. It will be on view through June 30th.
The Redeemer surfaced during a routine conservation at the Vatican, when restorers Alessandra Zarelli and Paolo Violini uncovered it beneath an overpainting by an unknown artist. The small oil on wood had hung in the Pope’s residence in the Apostolic Palace since 1967, when it was donated to Pope Paul VI by a Spanish official.
“Since its arrival in the Vatican, the work had never undergone restoration or scientific studies,” Zarelli shared with Artnet. “Having therefore noted some conservation problems during a routine check-up, it was decided to carry out a complete restoration to verify its general state of preservation and study its execution technique.”
During the routine check-up, the two restorers at the Vatican Museum’s paintings and wooden materials restoration laboratory discovered that an unknown forger had painted their own version of Christ over the top of El Greco’s work. Once the additional layers of paint were removed, high-resolution images revealed two more unfinished compositions on the canvas, reminiscent of the painter’s Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Lawrence (ca. 1580) and Saint Dominic in Adoration of the Crucifix (ca. 1590).
Four small holes that appear along the painting’s upper and lower edges suggest the panel had served in the past as a portable altarpiece, similar to Italian painter Federico Barocci’s Head of Christ (ca. 1590).
“The restoration of the painting led to the unexpected and exciting discovery of an unfinished work, which we can consider a true pictorial palimpsest,” said Fabio Moressi, director of the cabinet of scientific research at the Vatican, in a press statement. “Its incompleteness is not a flaw, but a source of valuable data that reveals the artist’s creative process.”
